The Nothing

I was pretty sure either I or someone else along the way had said this would probably require human sacrifice to resolve, maybe it was Zekrom.

If not, then there was no explanation for why I suddenly found myself not surprised and very underwhelmed with the situation. I need to jump on a grenade? Might not be enough?

Watch this.

"I… well, I'm a colony," I say after a split second hesitation, fusing my swords into one with alchemy and Corruption before disassembling my newly freed hand into a small but dense Spore Shoal. "You know what they say, what comes from the earth must return to it. If I'm not enough lives to pay the price, then it's a debt that will never be paid."

The whisper in my mind suddenly became more substantial and serious but never actually became threatening as it asked. "Who. Are. You." Somehow their way of emphasizing the words turned everything into a demand more than a question.

I was floored completely as I stopped to consider how to answer that question. Did I shrug it off with my name and the general 'you're going to love me' NPC approach? Should I flash my status with Melpomene around? No, this guy probably wants some backstory to get a feel for my character.

If I tried to evade it or respond with pride it will probably ruin everything for me.

"Originally, a human classless adventurer who saved a young lady in the Canfor region," I reply after a few seconds of organizing my thoughts. "This young lay's family was beset on the road by a traveling party of goblins and she was the only one spared. So, I escorted her to her closest living relatives who turned out to be this old widow in Sierra who lost her family in what is pretty much unknown circumstances to me beyond intentional by some third party.

"Part of why they were killed was because they were tracking your legend and they damn near located the place," I go on, only applying small amounts of emotional inflection to my voice because I barely needed to try at all. As much as I might not like her, I honestly felt bad for the old lady's fallen status and current conditions.

"Back to the… present… I bring the old lady one of her only surviving relations and she decides to invest everything but the assorted inheritances into this young relation. They're putting together a few small business operations in addition to those of my own party's, but that's beside the point. For the sake of investigation and closure, they sent me out here to track the original route and on the way I stumbled upon one of the cultists' side project. Cordycep Animatum.

"I got infected, traps myself and the area in ice to buy time, and did everything I could imagine to survive. Eventually, I transmuted myself and the cordycep colony into a single being using its abilities and my stats simply based on a mutual need to survive. Now, I can eat anything organic and make the inorganic into organic. I'm also a Traveler, so when I die I don't exactly stay dead."

Pointing at the cape that was the only thing in the golden skeleton's possession, I explain, "The reason the old lady's family tracked your legend and were killed is your mantle. The empire has placed a first class knighthood and its lifetime use as the price of its reclamation. Before, they were just wealthy aristocrats who avoided politics in preference of making money and that was why they could be targeted. Lana needs that mantle and you need someone alive to stop living. We need each other."

Nodding their head slowly, the golden skeleton makes its way BACK into the cage area and unceremoniously begins tearing up the floor. With the defensive slime and general resilience of the biomass, I was surprised to see that it was as simple as digging his golden bony fingers through dirt.

I just watched him digging up patches of biomass to reveal what looked like a plain gray slab of stone into which the slimy mucus constantly drained as if passing naturally through. Even as I considered trying to help, his voice reentered my head and said, "Do you not suffer from death?"

"If a monster or person kills me, I lose ten percent of my current level's worth of experience," I reply calmly, deciding it was best for me to stay back as more of the stone was revealed. Not only was their plain pale rock in large squares big enough to stand in but there were also squares of some black glassy substance. Like the regular rock, though, anything that touched it besides biomass simply passed through.

After several chess-like squares were revealed, Sir Pence stood up from the ground and says, "There, that should be enough for… one body. If your life can really pay the price, then all you need do is step in. I cannot pass through because of the gods or I might be the one going to fight for our world. I would give you the Mantle of Aegis, now, but then you would not be able to pass through just like me. If there anything you need to do before you go in there?"

Looking around the catacombs, I cannot help but wonder at the context that I was missing because of this game's open-ended type of story lines. I had essentially made my own shortcut through the dungeon's… dungeon… and thus had not collected any relevant information or experiences.

What happened in the last two-plus hundred years that caused the knight's soldiers to turn into monsters? How did somebody as supposedly powerful as Sir Pence end up trapped like that if he was protected by the gods? I knew the general cause of how this place came about due to cultist practices and dark magical sacrifices, but how did an other worldly entity get involved?

As well, was I really about to throw away my first life? I had gone like a week in reality without dying and here I was stepping up to the chopping block. The only things I could think about it was F*** my life and hoping that martydom came with benefits.

Shaking my head to clear these thoughts, I decide to simply wait until it was all over before asking Melpomene for the backstories belonging to this place. All that mattered right now was how it ended. Not how it happened.

Walking forward toward the edge of the torn biomass that revealed the original gateway between worlds underneath, I find myself staring down into an obsidian-like square of darkness that seemed to absorb light as well as the draining slime of the biomass.

"If I'm not enough…" I start to say while considering who would and who should be sacrificed after me, only to shake my head with a chagrined smile. "Never mind. If any of my friends get here before it's over, tell them I said to get the hell out while they still can. I'll be back in a little while to finish up."

With those last words, I simply step out over the edge of the biomass before placing one foot on the large obsidian square. Instead of simply passing through like I had expected, my foot simply stays on top of the square as if I was standing on a normal floor. Then, my foot sank in by a couple of inches as if snow was holding up my weight.

Once my foot sank in, the obsidian chess square suddenly cracked outward from around my foot as if my foot was the spider at the middle of its web. The fracturing lines of stone and glass spread in mere seconds, filling the catacombs with a symphony of shattering glass and stone sounds that were not unpleasant. Then, as the spiderweb of breakage finished forming, my foot started sinking in.

As soon as I felt myself entering the portal as if a vacuum was attached to my foot sinking in the breaking obsidian, I took one last look around the area as if I may never see it again. Even the biomass was splitting apart and drying out all around the gateway platform, causing the fleshy nastiness outside the platform to begin petrifying and decaying.

The gateway itself was falling apart with me as its epicenter just a couple feet away from the fleshy prison, massive pieces of jagged stone wee rising up like broken ship turning up in the water before swiftly sinking away out of sight. The decayed and petrifying biomass all around and reaching up to the ceiling was already crumbling.

A light glow of what looked like white light was even suffusing the area, covering Sir Pence and his humanoids to the point of nearly hiding their bodies from sight. Clearly this was the gods at work, probably offering their protection against the ensuing destruction as the biomass died out and the manor lost its ability to stand. Before any of that happened, though, I simply fell from the world of lights into a world of unfathomable darkness.

It was not just darkness that stripped me of my sight, I was suddenly stripped of everything. There were no sounds or vibrations, no winds or ground, I could not even feel myself breathing if there really was air. There was simply no sensory whatsoever in this place except for the most basic of philosophies.

I think, therefore I am.

Even though it felt like I was without a body I was still there left wondering and waiting in the nothing. What the hell just happened to me? Am I supposed to do something here? The hell is 'here', anyway? Is something else here?

What felt like both seconds and hours of running through 'mental' checks of myself trying to find a body and sense of touch, I finally felt something. However, it was not a body or any appropriate physical sense. It felt like a wave of 'existence' crossed over my mind or my current existence.

For several whiles of wondering what just happened and how, I simply waited with 'baited breath' for another source of stimuli despite the uncertainty and fear of the unknown it stimulated. Then it came again, giving me the impression of something like bumping shoulders with someone while walking. This time, though, it did not just sweep by.

Some of it was left behind, almost like bumping into somebody and getting their drink spilled on you. However, this 'drink' of stimuli did not go away and even felt… intentional. Like somebody was trying to get my attention and threw it at me.

Of course I tried interacting with it even though all I had were my thoughts, so I tried thinking and yelling at the existence stuck on me. It felt somewhat like me in the sense that the interaction was purely… mental. So, after a while of trying to figure out was was stuck on me and giving me odd vibes, an adverse sense of deja vu reminded me of what this interaction and stimuli felt like.

It also happened again, another wave of existence washed over me and once again left a streak of mentality. This time, though, the combinations of these psionic pulses seemed to combine to form more coherency. It was like a question, but it was simply the upward inflect that came at the end as if someone was saying, 'huh?'

They were not trying to get my attention, this was something like my Channeling skill which produced pulses of spiritual energy to attract ghosts. Except, even though this still felt like spiritually energy, it also felt different. Not just a different spiritual source but also a different purpose.

It felt like I had just been pinged in the dark with a neon sonar paintball. The uncertainty of the unknown I had felt under the shock of interaction now grew stronger and rose to the forefront of what I felt. I did not know how I knew, but I simply instinctively knew that something could see me.

The same source of certainty in the unknown also drove me to do the same thing, trigger Channeling and send out a ping of my own. Seconds after that one ping, I saw a slow and broad 'smear' appear in my mind and in the distance at the same time. I also now had a sense of myself, giving me nothing more than a 'position' in the middle of the nothingness in correspondence with the other entity.

If distance and mana were relevant in this place, then I could now tell that I had spent hundreds of MP on that first ping because the entity was over a hundred yards away from me. It was big, too, and not Zekrom or even the bone fiend command big. This thing was like me standing next to an ant.

My thin smear of 'ping' had painted its entire existence the same way I had been, allowing me to perceive thousands of eyes and tentacles making up a mass little less than the empty space between us. Like a rowboat next to a naval carrier, I finally no longer questioned it.

There were just some things I had zero chance of dealing with. The bitch was bigger than the bottom of the catacombs and was looking dead at me with every eye on its frontal tentacles and 'lobe' of its core body. No amount of speed or combined strengths would put a dent in this thing.

That makeshift ultimate I hit Traytar with? That would be me getting this guy's attention in order to ask if he had an itch I could ATTEMPT to scratch for him.

For the first time in my entire life, in all the video games I had ever played and confrontations I had really experienced, I had the urge to simply die before I every actually faced that thing in any way whatsoever. I was suddenly consumed with an overwhelming sense of shock and fear that immediately made me contemplate my entire existence as a whole.

I usually avoided bragging but in reality I liked to think of myself as a small-time badass. In VR games, I usually just considered myself a flat-out badass. At this moment, I could have cried if I had tears to shed.

*